BOOK:Luc Tuymans-Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings Volumes 1-3, David Zwirner Books / Yale University Press

Credited with a key role in the revival of painting in the 1990s, Luc Tuymans continues to produce subtle, and at times unsettling, works that engage with history, technology, and everyday life. The Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings Vol 1 surveys nearly two hundred works that were vital to his artistic development. The years 1972 to 1994 witnessed the maturation of his signature method of painting from preexisting imagery as well as his first solo exhibitions. Also dating from this period are many of his seminal canvases, including “Gaskamer” and “Schwarzheide” (both 1986), which were part of the artist’s first gallery solo exhibition in 1988; “Die Zeit” (1988), a four-part work shown in his critically acclaimed Documenta presentation in 1992; along with “Der diagnostische Blick” (1992), a group of ten poignant portraits of the ailing human body. Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings: Vol 2: Between the years 1995 and 2006, Tuymans’s work trended toward ideas of national and collective memory. In 1996, the artist created a group of ten paintings entitled “The Heritage”, for which he transformed familiar images of American life, such as Mount Rushmore, baseball caps, and the United States flag, into unsettling visions, addressing the country’s perceived vulnerability, both physical and psychological, following the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. Paintings from “Mwana Kitoko: Beautiful White Man”, his seminal body of work that was first shown at David Zwirner, New York, in 2000, after which he expanded the series for his presentation for the Belgian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2001, depict imagery derived from the fraught history of Belgian colonial rule of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Also included is one of Tuymans’s best-known paintings, “The Secretary of State” (2005), a powerful yet seemingly vulnerable portrayal of Condoleezza Rice, which conjures the long history of racial and sexual prejudice in the United States, not as something that has been overcome, but as an active force shaping our reality. Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings: Vol 2: The works in this volume, made between 2007 to 2018, show Tuymans at his most virtuosic, subtly but provocatively addressing a range of topics including religion, corporatization, and cultural memory, in addition to modernism and the history of painting. The internet, in particular, is central to these works as is the screen—leading to a new style of contemporary image. The works are mediatized to the nth degree, despite the artist’s continuous use of the traditional medium of painting. There is a certain kind of light that comes out of a screen, which can be found in Tuymans’s recent paintings.-Dimitris Lempesis